


Bloom, bear fruit, sleep

by brightly_lit



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Past Violence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovered Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 08:32:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6947845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightly_lit/pseuds/brightly_lit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Contemplating the life cycle of plum trees, Bucky struggles to understand his own, and to figure out how to live in a normal world.</p><p> </p><p>Takes place between Winter Soldier and Civil War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bloom, bear fruit, sleep

Ripe plums appeared at the market in late summer. All of the stone fruit did. Strawberries arrived sooner. The long days of winter with only a few oldening apples and pumpkins made the first appearance of strawberries so welcome, it seemed almost magical. Almost impossible.

All the people walking about town unafraid, living lives that made sense to them--that seemed impossible, too. They lived as they pleased. No one ever retrieved them, programmed them, and sent them out to end other lives. Plum trees froze in the dead of winter, and then they came back to life. They always came back to life. 

Bucky took comfort from this, during endless nights full of terror as he relived what he had done. He’d be just on the edge of sleep and some horrific memory would suddenly explode in his mind. He didn’t talk much, but he listened. He heard people talk about their nightmares, the relief to wake and realize they were only inventions of their minds. 

Bucky woke from dreams of old New York, palling around with Steve, well-dressed and good-looking and a little bit cocky, to nightmare truths he was always waking up to, in dozens of ways: the movement of a dress in the breeze would make him reach for a gun on a back holster he no longer possessed. A queer expression on someone’s face would remind him of someone who looked just like this once, lying dead on the snow as he searched the body. A lone bird flying desperately west at dusk searching for its flock before dark fell would make him, too, begin to search for a bunker or cave or other installation he was supposed to report back to before remembering he was meant to fly as fast as he could in the other direction now.

He saw danger in any quick, deliberate movement. Terror gripped him frequently--blinding, overpowering terror--a terror he was once programmed to be able to push aside with ease to focus on the task at hand, which now simply overwhelmed him at regular intervals. 

Once upon a time, he’d have told Steve there was nothing to be afraid of. Of course there were things to be afraid of, but that’s what people told themselves. Sometimes he sat and wondered for a long time how he had been able to say that. There was everything to be afraid of. 

His days were waking with the dawn, struggling to attend to the daily business of keeping himself fed and clothed and sheltered--a perpetually baffling enterprise he was nonetheless glad of to keep his mind distracted. Seeing the sun and the people, listening, until finally it was dark and growing cold and he had to go home to his small apartment that was somehow all his, where he was let alone to live as he wished. He would make himself dinner and try not to remember, until he lay still in bed and memory was all he was, memory and terror, horror and regret, so sharp he could hardly breathe, until fatigue bested him in a battle over sleep and he awoke again, not inside a cryo chamber, to birds chirping loudly. He always came back to life. 

He would feel the supple unleafed branches of the plum trees on the outskirts of town. Sometimes he vivisected them, seeking the secret to their immortality. To their obedience to sun and water and instinct, blooming and bearing fruit and going dutifully to sleep as commanded, ready to comply with the natural order they obeyed.

He had to sift through several levels and iterations of instinct, memory, and fear before he was sure the quick movement of dark-clothed men through the crowd was not merely triggering another memory; it signaled immediate danger. Someone was coming for him, as someone always did.

They would fight, and Bucky would win, his programming kicking in, muscle memory, instinct, numbing his brain even more thoroughly than sleep. In that sea of dead bodies, his programming would come to an abrupt end, and he would struggle to surface, to find another instinct, a natural instinct, to tell him what to do next. Bloom, bear fruit, sleep, for a century, for longer. Forever.


End file.
